Booklife

Sometimes we forget to breathe when it comes to our creativity. By which I mean we are so busy creating and interacting with the world that we forget to pause, to be silent, to be alone. The imagination, the spark of all creativity, is a renewable resource, but it is not an inexhaustible resource. You can raze the forest, drink the stream dry, and not get it back…or not get it back right away.

As I get older, I have more and more of an appreciation for the need to be still, the need to be silent, and the need to be alone. I have less energy than I did when I was younger. My mind is less elastic, less flexible. On the other hand, because I have to be I am craftier now than I was in the twenties or thirties, and I have more experience, although not necessarily more wisdom.

Any wisdom I do have as regards tending to my own personal creativity has to do with monitoring myself and knowing my limits—allowing space for my imagination to guide me, and for it to recharge after long, difficult creative endeavors.

Two particular examples: after finishing the last novel in my Ambergris cycle, Finch, I made myself take a break from fiction. I knew that I would not just be worn out from writing an intense novel but also going out into the world to read from it and tell people about it. I also knew that I would experience a sense of loss from having lived in a world and with characters for not just three books but eighteen years of my life: almost my entire adult life. You cannot help but feel unmoored and at sea after such an immersive experience—and an experience that took so much of your imagination to see through to completion, with each book a different type of spark, a different approach to creation. So I gave myself permission not to write fiction. I forgave myself in advance…and slowly, over time, I could feel the urge to write fiction come back, and the inklings of inspiration, and those moments of going to sleep with a character or idea in my head…and waking up to find the solution, the catalyzing image, the scene expressed whole in my mind.

On a smaller, weekly scale, I also monitor my limits. Recently, my wife Ann and I undertook a fairly mammoth anthology in terms of concept and the number of what I’d call “moving parts”: The Thackery T. Lambshead Cabinet of Curiosities (HarperCollins, 2011). For this book of fictions we needed faked museum exhibits, recollections of visits with Dr. Lambshead, fiction in the form of essays, and traditional short stories—all integrated with art from over 25 artists, some of them living in countries as far away as Russia. Just keeping this straight in your head is a task, let alone seizing opportunities for communication between fictions created by sometimes wildly different writers. In addition, I knew I’d be writing the connective tissue in the form of a fictional frame and fictional introductions to each section, and that these would set not just the context but the emotional tone. Well, this stuff doesn’t just conjure itself out of blue sky and clean air. It is a cumulative process and you can’t just leap in and do it all in one go. You need space: silence, stillness, aloneness. It’s a stop-and-go-and-stop-again process. Otherwise, you wring the rags dry and what comes out is attenuated, brittle, uninteresting.

So for the past two weeks, my goal hasn’t been just to write this material—it has been to set up roadblocks to writing, to find ways to procrastinate and delay so that (1) my imagination has the time necessary to work through the creative problem set before it and examine all of the possibilities and (2) so that I don’t reach that point of attenuation where it’s almost as if you’ve cooked your chicken dinner until it’s dry and practically inedible. It looks like something moist and delicious, but it most definitely isn’t.

Being aware of your limits—weekly, monthly, yearly—and having, in an odd way, the discipline to know when not to write, when to let yourself breathe, is part of making sure you have a long and happy career in your chosen creative endeavor.

There’s been a lot of discussion about fiction by women, special issues of fiction by women, feminist criticism, and possible disparities in the number of submissions by men versus women.

It may seem like a tangent, but I think portions of this section of Booklife pertaining to the support of your partner or friends are relevant to the conversation. So here’s your Monday post, two days early… – Jeff

Writing is a solitary activity, but you need to have some kind of moral support or it can become a lonely activity. I’m lucky in that my wife Ann is my partner in editing projects, my first reader for books, and loves my work — yet she still has the distance to give me honest feedback. Because she isn’t also a fiction writer, there’s no tension between rival careers, the kind of dynamic that’s especially destructive when one writer’s career is going strong and the other’s is entering a decaying orbit.

But support comes in many forms. It might come from friends and family instead, whether or not you’re in a committed relationship. It might be less proactive, as in the case of a partner who believes in your effort and helps you find time for it. In one case, a friend’s husband supported her for over fifteen years, believing in her even if he didn’t always care for her work. One day, after hundreds of rejections, she not only got a book deal, she won a literary award with a huge cash prize, received offers for publication in foreign language editions, and now provides most of the income for their family. Without her husband’s belief in her, she might never have gotten to that point.

Only one situation is intolerable for the health of your Private Booklife: to have a partner who either passive-aggressively or actively doesn’t support you — doesn’t support you or the work. I know several people in relationships like that and, inevitably, if the person is serious about pursuing their goals, they find someone else to support them emotionally (or they quit writing). In a sense, they have an emotional affair with another person — someone who better appreciates their writing and their goals.

In his book Word Work, award-winning writer Bruce Holland Rogers has done a great job of identifying the six main areas in which a partnership can hurt or help a writer: Identity, Work Habits, Play Habits, Audience, Blame, and Gender Roles. I haven’t found any better description of the dynamics of support in a relationship between a writer and his or her partner. Here’s a summary of his analysis of these six areas:

Identity. A partner can either help confirm or deny your identity as a writer. A partner who tends to agree with the view of the wider world that your dream is futile or impractical (or, worse, ridiculous) helps to erode your identity as a writer. A partner who confirms that identity helps you to create a separate reality in which you are a writer. This also creates a positive space in the home for your writing.

Work Habits. Your partner should be respectful of your personal space — not, for example, forever tidying piles of material that may look like a mess but constitute the organic progress of a book for some people. In addition, you may have odd habits, like stopping in mid-sentence to write down a sudden idea or image. Ideally your partner will try to understand this behavior and not take it personally or think of it as rudeness. It’s an essential part of many writers’ process. (Nor, however, should you feign a certain amount of eccentricity to get out of responsibilities.)

Play Habits. A vital element of stimulating the imagination is play, which means writers can be pretty silly sometimes. A partner who doesn’t engage in reciprocal play with you may actually be stifling your ability to recharge your imaginative batteries. At the very least, reacting negatively to a playful situation will make it harder for you to be creative over time — especially if that sense of play involves sex.

Audience. You must be understanding of partners who do not want the role of reading and responding to your work. Although there’s a great temptation to want your partner to be your first reader, not all people are suited to this job. Don’t force the issue, especially in a situation where the partner is otherwise supportive.

Blame. You shouldn’t blame your own creative frustration on your partner. Partners often sacrifice as much as the writer for the writer to have the space and time to be creative. Blaming your partner for your problems isn’t just wrong, it’s unjust.

Gender Roles. Your relationship with a partner should acknowledge the unique stressors pursuing a creative dream can put on the division of labor in a household. Unfortunately, many homes still assign certain roles to women and other roles to men. Male writers in particular can unwittingly take advantage of that traditional division of labor to find time to be creative at the expense of their partner’s time and effort. Without a frank discussion of roles within the household, and finding a realistic balance that benefits both parties, someone will eventually be simmering with resentment, and communication will deteriorate. As one female writer who wished to remain anonymous put it in an email to me: “[The significance of sacrifice is] wrapped up for me in the stress/struggle I have as a female writer, on the losing end of gender expectations. There a number of things I always felt like I should do: cook healthy meals, exercise, keep the house clean for me and my significant other, remember my friends’ and family’s birthdays, be there for my five younger siblings whenever they need me, etc. Yet I’m constantly aware of the fact that all the time I spend on those good things is time that I’m not writing. I constantly feel guilty — either guilty because I’m not writing, or guilty because I’m not keeping up with the tasks mentioned above. I think women are probably more prone to that feeling of guilt and personal failing than men, though perhaps that’s just a stereotype.”

This last issue, of gender roles, speaks to another issue, as well: the value of self-sufficiency. No matter how much support you receive, there’s something solitary at the heart of being a writer, and you alone are responsible for making the decisions that nurture and support your creative life. There can be a liberating quality in recognizing this fact. As Tessa Kum puts it, “I’m flying solo in every sense of the word. No one does the dishes. No one requires my time. No one tells me what I can and can’t do. Every good and great and kind thing a partner might do for me, I do for myself. Every harsh and horrible and crippling thing a partner might do for me, I do for myself.”

As the year comes to an end, I’ve been thinking about leverage, which I talk about in Booklife. But in Booklife, while I have a separate section on paying it forward and contributing to community, I’m not sure I fully tie the idea of leverage to the idea of paying it forward.

Your writerly “leverage,” as I define it, is a kind of political capital. You can amass it based on your visibility through your online presence and your books, published short stories, etc. It consists of intangibles beyond audience, too. The respect and affection others have for you affects your leverage–how people perceive you as both writer and human being.

You use leverage to make your projects, your books, successful–leverage breeds leverage–but it serves, or should serve, another purpose. You should use your leverage (or position or privilege) to be of use to other people in the writing community (or even outside of it). No matter what level you’re at, there’s something you can do to help someone else.

I’ve met writers who hoard leverage or privilege, who feel that concealing their contacts, masking their methodology, building closed cliques, ignoring talented people who ask for help, is the best way of helping their careers.

Maybe this is true in the short term, but the fact is the best way to build leverage long-term is to be open and useful to others–as much as you can be without disrupting your own time for writing and other creative endeavor.

Paying it forward, contributing to community, can at times be controversial or uncomfortable or actually cause you to lose prestige or respect temporarily. The whole point, at times, of using your position is to expend it like rocket fuel–in a short burst that is of immeasurable value to someone else.

I think about this, too, because sometimes people get into positions of power by being miserly with their leverage…and never realize that they’ve reached a position where they can afford to take a stand, be publicly controversial for the greater good. And so they don’t.

Whatever level you’re at now, don’t be that person. If you die without calling in all your markers, for others, for yourself…you lose.

What I’m saying is this: whether you’re a writer with one published story or a writer with twenty novels out, you have some leverage. What you can do might be tiny in scope, but might mean a lot to someone.

As we enter 2010, in a perilous publishing atmosphere, with a lot of uncertainty ahead, we should all be thinking of about not just ourselves but others. Trust me when I say the more connectivity you build, the more good works you foster, on whatever level, the more you, too, will benefit in the long run.

This is a rare cross-post to Ecstatic Days.

Starting in January, we’ll have all-new content about viral campaigns, more wisdom from Matt Staggs, the nature of book tours in the modern era, posts on teaching the lessons of a private/public booklife, and much more. This week, with the holidays upon us, we’ll be running videos from my recent book tour. These first two were interviews with Tom Nissley, Amazon books editor, originally posted on the Amazon book blog, Omnivoracious.

Booklife has gone into a second printing, and you can order it online through Amazon, among others–and still give it as a gift by Christmas.